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Friday, February 25, 2011

I was considering Zoopocalypse again the other night, and then started thinking about a zoo’s similarity to our games’ dungeon - its winding paths that lead to exhibits is rather like a dungeon's tunnels, leading to larger chambers and creatures perhaps never seen before… The fun of discovering something new in a zoo visit is something like what we create with dungeon crawls, enhanced with an element of supposed danger.

So I went looking for some zoo maps online and ended up getting totally carried away, downloading one after another to look at more closely for inspiration in creating my own maps later. Some inspire with their art and design; perspective, cut-away views, and colors being used to provide ease of navigation and more information. Others I could even see GIMP’ing, replacing the animal descriptions and icons with monsters, and turning the whole thing into a dungeon.

I went through just about every major zoo’s website in the U.S. and Canada I could easily find, downloaded their maps, and merged them into one gigantic PDF. I put in some interesting aquarium maps that I found along the way too, but I had to leave a lot out due to poor resolution. You can download it on Scribd if interested.

You know we ran a really cool game at a convention using All Flesh Must Be Eaten. There were zombies in the zoo and zombie animals. You should have seen the one player as he tried to use the zoo-mobile (the golf cart) to attack the zombie lion.

@Stuart & richardthinks: That's what I'd been thinking too: The theme parks might be great fun for a zombie or post-apoc game, the malls I can see incorporating into large space ship maps for a Sci-Fi game of some kind (malls and zombies being too obvious).